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CONTENT TYPE: Article | TOPIC: Branding

Many brands and companies today are constantly reinvigorating their businesses and positioning them for growth. There is a constant need to innovate, reinvigorate, update, recalibrate, or just simply fend off the competition in an effort to better explain "why buy me." To move forward, companies and brands need to first take a look at their current brand positioning. But for a moment, it makes sense to go back to the brand drawing board to answer the question, "Just what is brand positioning, anyway?"

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If you're a marketer, every undelivered message translates into lost revenue. Luckily, there are ways to improve the odds of delivery and decrease the chance of running into problems in the first place. The key to email deliverability lies in earning the trust of internet service providers, or ISPs. Because these companies need to provide quality service to their subscribers, they devise standard protocols and policies regarding unsolicited bulk email.

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Should your company should start a blog, open a Facebook account, or be on YouTube? Start by taking a giant step backward and assessing the social media landscape as it relates to your market, your buyers, and your competitors. Here are three key factors to consider.

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Your media plan likely contains all the usual, well-known media options: TV and radio ads, print ads and outdoor advertising. We've all been going with these options for years, decades in fact. We've always known we wouldn't be fired for nominating them. Just like an IT guy wouldn't be fired for installing an IBM solution. But this security is fast disappearing. One day soon, you might be fired for limiting yourself to these options.

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Today's diverse consumers are looking for more than just talk. They want companies to be an authentic part of their niche community. They are savvy and skeptical. They are watching to see how sincere you are in including them—as employees, senior managers, board members, media partners, vendors, and so on...

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At a recent conference, Sylvia Reynolds, chief marketing officer for Wells Fargo, asked, "When did Marketing become the make-it-pretty department?" Reynolds then reminded conference participants that the fundamental role of Marketing has always been about the customer. Essentially, Marketing's role is to find, keep, and grow the value of customers. So what does that mean, and how does a marketer get beyond the "make it pretty" syndrome?

CONTENT TYPE: Article | TOPIC: Social Media Marketing

Considering the stakes, it's no surprise that the online sales channel is becoming increasingly important to the bottom line of top-shelf brands as consumers of luxury products and services continue to demonstrate their willingness to spend as much through commerce-enabled Web sites as they do in stores. Despite this trend, many luxury brands continue to separate their online and mainline marketing efforts, confusing customers with disconnected messaging and missing golden opportunities to cross-support expensive marketing initiatives. What few realize is that the best experience—the experience that the customer wants—results when all channels work together and complement each other. Here are some guiding principles to help brands achieve this goal.

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Nonprofits are confronted with many of the questions that any other enterprise often ponders: How do I connect with my customers? Which communication vehicle will provide my organization with the highest return on investment? How can I determine what my target market wants? While many of our corporate friends have turned to email marketing to help answer these questions, the concept is comparatively new to nonprofits. Email marketing may not be the silver bullet for every problem, but it provides us with an efficient and affordable tool to communicate with our constituents.

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As a result of its online customer community, a company can get much more than basic product feedback. It gains deep insight into the needs of customers, and creates ever-greater customer loyalty by embracing customers as co-designers. Most importantly, the company goes directly to the source for product enhancements, pulling new innovations and ideas directly from the minds of the customers who use, buy, and recommend its products. This is the holy grail of customer-centered product design. Online customer communities can enable the connections, host the conversations, and facilitate the processes that make routine innovation possible.

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We design our marketing campaigns for "rational" buyers. But do buyers ever act rationally? In a preview of his keynote at the MarketingProfs event next month, NY Times bestselling author and MIT Prof Dan Ariely talks about the irrational factors that influence buying decisions.

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Viral marketing has been all the rage in recent years: Companies are intoxicated with the idea of creating the next video that spreads across the Internet and becomes a viral sensation. But for every successful viral effort there are countless attempts that totally miss the mark. Here's where David Meerman Scott comes in. Scott understands why ideas spread in a Web 2.0 world, and he educates his clients on why the "old school" rules of PR and marketing are totally irrelevant in a time of content-sharing on YouTube and Twitter.

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If you've heard it once, you've heard it a thousand times: subject lines matter when it comes to email marketing. Think of subject lines like the headline of a newspaper article. If it grabs you, you start to read. Over the past few months, the author collected subject lines from all sorts of senders, all based on how they grabbed him the second he saw them. What you'll see here is quick analysis of what he liked or despised. The hope is that after perusing this piece, you get a sense of what other marketers are doing and how you can be better, resulting in more opens, more views, and more purchases.

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An engagement between a buyer and a seller begins with a single point of contact. It could be as a sale or an inquiry that, with the appropriate follow-up, can be converted into an ongoing experience for both the seller and the buyer. It is such an experience or set of experiences that create what we define as an engagement—or at least the potential of creating one.

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As a marketing professional, you likely work in a specialized function that may feel like a silo in your company. But you're also best positioned to break down the walls between your function and others (like R&D, sales, finance, and so forth). It's not an easy task, but the following five tactics can help.

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HTML email marketing is now thriving and widely encouraged for its strong ROI and results. Pundits predict an ROI of $45.65 for every dollar spent on email marketing in 2008. Email was also voted best marketing vehicle for customer retention, according to Jupiter Research. HTML email has come a long way, but there is one major pain point that remains: compatibility across all major email accounts.

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Today's technology offers ample opportunities to start conversations with and among customers, fans, foes, competitors, and the press—any person or group who cares to listen and, perhaps, act on the messages received. By some estimates, 85% of the information companies collect is not in a form that they can access or analyze—it is unstructured. The Gartner Group reports unstructured data doubles every three months while seven million web pages are published every day. This cacophony presents the one of the biggest challenges companies face today.

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One of the biggest challenges that marketing departments face is producing marketing tools that actually get used by the sales team. You want to create marketing tools that help sell products, not collateral that sits on a shelf. So how do you do it? How do you create a marketing tool that not only gets used but also can reinforce your marketing messaging so that everyone is speaking the same language?

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You may or may not be using the basic segmentation strategy of RFM (recency, frequency, monetary): dividing your email mailing list into a few buckets based on recency in ordering or visitation to the site, the number of times they've ordered or visited the site, and the lifetime spend. But here's a better approach to segmentation.

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As web marketers seek new ways to boost conversion rates and improve the site experience of their visitors, interest in multivariate testing is on a feverish rise. But those unfamiliar with the techniques are often unclear about where to start, or how to ensure success.

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by Lester Wunderman